


do you like fish sticks

by VagabondDiesel



Category: South Park
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mental Institution, Attempt at Humor, Gen, Mental Hospital, Mental Institutions, Realistic, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-07
Updated: 2016-12-07
Packaged: 2018-09-07 01:46:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8778232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VagabondDiesel/pseuds/VagabondDiesel
Summary: “There’s no way, man! I would never get fish sticks! Fish could have bones in it, and they could get stuck in my throat, and then what?” he exclaimed.
  
        He was starting to catch the attention of the other patients, and Craig desperately scanned the room for a nurse, a doctor, anybody else who could handle this situation. Was there some sort of procedure that had to be followed? Fuck, what if he got shanked? Wasn’t somebody supposed to be supervising these people?
  
       To his dismay, there was still no staff member to be seen. He was going to complain about this to his supervisor, for sure. Somebody was going to get bitched out for this - it wasn’t his job to deal with mental health patients. The shanking thing was sticking in his mind no matter how hard he tried to dismiss it.
  
       “Look,” he began, dropping his voice below the usual conversational level in his best attempt to sound reassuring. “I promise that there’s no bones in them.”





	

     The wheels of the serving cart clattered as it was pushed down the hallway. The cart was a familiar object to the one who pushed it - although not familiar in a way that was particularly notable. The relationship between it and the young adult at its helm was strictly functional. Every day, except Tuesdays, and Sundays, three times a day, it was pulled from its parking spot in the storage room close to the kitchens and loaded with food trays before being dragged around the sprawling complex of the hospital.  
     It might not have been such a tedious job if it didn’t involve backtracking to kitchens constantly for another load, or if the meals he was delivering were at least somewhat appetizing. By now, the odor had devolved from something that he might have considered eating voluntarily at one point in time to a relatively indistinguishable food-sort of smell that was slightly reminiscent of dishwashers. Not that it was bad - he had opportunities to sample his wares in the past and found that their major shortcoming was not in unpalatability, but in their absolute genericity. They could have been salvageable with some extra touches here and there; a bit more salt, a dash of seasoning, a dollop of something sweet - but the administrators at the hospital who decided on things such as budgeting and purchasing did not prioritize the cuisine. 

     One wheel rattled loudly, doing an erratic sort of sideways dance across the linoleum tiles before settling back on course. Craig Tucker suppressed an exasperated sigh. Food carts were not very high as far as the hospital’s priorities went either. It had been doing that half the morning, just as it had yesterday and the day before, and he wasn’t certain he could get through tomorrow without attempting to push it out of a window on one of the higher stories.  
     Unfortunately enough, that was one of the very few scenarios in which said cart would be fixed or replaced. He tried to think of less damning ways the cart could be put out of service permanently as he hit the button for the maintenance elevator, although even as he plotted he knew that none of them would ever come to fruition. He wished solving the problem could be as easy as just taking one of the other carts instead, but the other food service staff had established an inflexible, unspoken system where each employee had exclusive rights to a particular one. His had been just fine until the wheel had started to go out.  
     His thoughts turned from destroying his cart to ways he might be able to snipe Clyde’s out from underneath him without having him completely flip his shit. Bullying? Coercion? Deception? Each one of these options seemed as equally ineffective as they might have been effective. Clyde could be a pushover at times, but perhaps not to the extent where he would trade off his perfectly functional cart for a shitty one. And if he attempted to force the matter, it was likely that he would go whining to their supervisor. Then again, if all the food service employees started fighting over the working carts it might be enough to incite the powers that be to procure acceptable replacements. 

     The elevator chimed, and Craig stopped daydreaming. He had arrived at his next stop - the mental health ward.  
     It was not usually as interesting of a stop as one might think it would be. There was one particular incident where a balding, middle aged man whom Craig assumed had Down’s Syndrome threw his tray at the wall and began yelling incoherently before being taken away by the ward staff, but for the most part the patients filtered in, sat at their assigned tables, and picked at their food without much comment or reaction to any of it at all.  
     Every now and then somebody would have a question about what was being served or the choices on their slips for their next meal, but Craig did his best to either dodge them entirely or keep his answers as brief as possible, just as he did with every other patient in the hospital. Truth be told, he didn’t have much knowledge or authority when it came to the meals at all. Somebody decided on what was being cooked for the day several weeks in advance and filled in a template for the chits that were passed along to the patients. Somebody else brought the little slips to the patients so that they could fill them out, and yet another person collected them and brought them back to the kitchens, where the cooks reheated economy-sized bags of food and the servers portioned out servings of whatever it was that the patients “chose” and piled stacks of covered trays, all of which were a uniform faded olive color, according to their designated locations in the hospital.  
     He put the trays on the cart and dropped them off. And then he went back around to the beginning as soon as he had finished with that to collect them. That was all. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it paid abnormally well for a part-time job and as much as he had a tendency to complain about them, he knew that his duties weren’t all that demanding. He didn’t particularly enjoy his job, but it was tolerable enough, the paychecks were enough to chip in towards rent on the house he shared with several other roommates and have some left over for whatever minor indulgences he chose to entertain. Craig didn’t intend to work at the hospital forever, but until he found the Next Best Thing, he wasn’t really inclined to leave. Then again, he spent little to no time or effort searching for the Next Best Thing in his life, so it was likely that he would be working at the hospital for the remainder of his immediate future. 

     The cart squeaked to a stop in the dining area and Craig began unloading the trays. Each patient in the mental health ward had an assigned seat at an assigned table - something that was likely closely supervised by the doctors and staff of the ward, if his assumptions were correct. Or perhaps it wasn’t. He didn’t really know, and he didn’t particularly care enough to follow through on that particular train of thought.  
     It was supper time, and as such, the majority of the patients were already loitering around the dining area, waiting for their tray to be dropped off. Mornings were less active - there was the usual small group of opportunists that would wait around to eat as soon as their meals came, but the majority of the others filtered in after Craig had finished there and moved on to the next ward. Collecting the dirty dishes was a task he favored simply because most of the inpatient wards closed off their dining area for cleaning after meals and he could go about his work without having to interact either directly or indirectly with anybody.  
     This trip was just another in a long series of non-incidental ones just like it - or so it seemed until he set one particular tray in front of a young man who seemed to be about his own age. 

     “Um, excuse me?”  
     Craig didn’t even realize he was being addressed until the patient in question desperately tried to flag him down as he was about to move on the the next table.  
     “Excuse me?”  
     Craig didn’t answer him verbally, instead choosing to turn around to face the person who was calling for him before cocking an eyebrow in the form of an unspoken question. His mother had told him countless times that it was unsociable and could be misconstrued as intimidating. Craig thought that this point was a matter of opinion. Frankly, he thought that it gave him less obligation to continue a conversation after it started. For the most part, it seemed to work. 

     “Sorry,” the patient continued nervously, his hesitant tone of voice a contradiction to his refusal to shy away from Craig’s stare. He was wearing one of the hospital issue sweatshirts - a drab maroon-colored affair with the laces pulled out of the hood by the staff so that they couldn’t be utilized in some desperate suicide attempt. Craig recognized him mostly due to his unruly platinum-blond hair more than anything else - he was one of the ward’s long-term patients, individuals that seemed to stick around for months on end while others cycled in and then out again in a matter of weeks, if not days.  
     This one definitely had something going on, though Craig didn’t have the knowledge or experience to guess at what it was. Anxious energy seemed to radiate from him like electricity, and every now and then he would simultaneously flinch and shiver violently despite the comfortable sixty eight degree temperature maintained throughout the ward.  
     “Sorry,” he continued, repeating himself needlessly. “But this isn’t what I ordered.” 

     Craig took the handful of steps needed to circle back and compared the offered slip to the uncovered tray. The tray had fish sticks on it. The slip read “Meatloaf (Beef, Pork, and Carrots)” right above “Fish Sticks (with Coleslaw)”. Neither of the boxes were checked.  
     Normally, this would indicate no preference. After all, this was a hospital, not a restaurant, and no matter how much a patient disliked the choices they were going to be served some sort of meal regardless of their opinion on the matter. 

     “You don’t have either of them checked,” Craig pointed out as he handed back the slip of paper. Not before his eyes caught on the name “Tweek Tweak”. That couldn’t be his birth name. No way would somebody name their kid something like that. 

     His response only seemed to agitate Tweek more.  
     “There’s no way, man! I would never get fish sticks! Fish could have bones in it, and they could get stuck in my throat, and then what?” he exclaimed.  
     He was starting to catch the attention of the other patients, and Craig desperately scanned the room for somebody, anybody else who could handle this situation other than him. Was there some sort of procedure that had to be followed? If there was, he was never told of one, and to further complicate the situation, there didn’t seem to be another staff member in sight. Fuck, what if he got shanked? Wasn’t somebody supposed to be supervising these people?  
     Craig found himself edging away as much as he could without drawing attention to the fact that he was doing so. As uncomfortable with the situation as he was, he didn’t want to stop halfway through his current trip to go back to the kitchens and get a meatloaf tray. There would be questions, and confusion, and somehow Craig would end up getting treated like he was making a big hassle for everybody else despite the fact that he really had nothing to do with the matter. He immediately started second-guessing how much he liked this job, really, on a deeper, less attended channel of his psyche as he tried to formulate some sort of solution at the same time. 

     There was still no staff member in sight. Craig cleared his throat in an attempt to make his voice sound like less of a rusted door hinge than it already was. For being twenty two and for apparently no reason at all, his tone had a nasal rasp that sounded much like that of one of those burnt-out waitresses that worked at twenty four hour diners and had been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day since they were fourteen, and it was something he was incredibly self-conscious about.  
     “Normally if you don’t check anything, it means no preference,” he tried to explain. “So the servers just sort of pick for you instead.”  
     Tweek ran his fingers through his hair, furthering its state of disarray while his facial expression communicated the point that the entire situation was akin to a matter of life and death.  
     “But I didn’t want fish sticks! The bones!” 

     To Craig’s dismay, there was still no staff member to be seen. He was going to complain about this to his supervisor, for sure. Somebody was going to get bitched out for this - it wasn’t his job to deal with mental health patients. The shanking thing was sticking in his mind no matter how hard he tried to dismiss it.  
     “Look,” he began, dropping his voice below the usual conversational level in his best attempt to sound reassuring. “I promise that there’s no bones in them.”  
     He had a nagging feeling that he probably wasn’t supposed handle a situation this way, but fuck it, he didn’t know what else to do. “The meat’s all processed, so any bones would have been ground up. Fish bones are kinda soft anyway. Like-” He struggled for an analogy. “Like, not even as hard as dried pasta. And they’re really small.” 

     That probably wasn’t what he was supposed to say at all, and even he wasn’t really convinced. He was already mentally bracing himself to make the long trip back to the kitchens when the patient sighed and poked at the breaded nuggets with his fork. They were allowed to have forks? The shanking thing immediately came back to mind. Somebody definitely should be supervising them. They had _forks_.  
     “Alright, I guess,” Tweek conceded entirely unexpectedly, though he didn’t look like he really believed Craig’s halfhearted assurances at all.  
     “Thanks for bringing my food up. And, uh, sorry for making a scene.”  
     For a moment, Craig was too taken aback to respond, but he finally managed a “Sure, you’re welcome,” even if his delivery was a few seconds too late. 

     For lack of anything else to follow up on, he went on to finish his rounds in the mental health ward, albeit in a minor state of turmoil that was in direct contradiction to his usual apathy. He was just setting out one of the last trays when a commotion rose from one of the tables he had already served - specifically, Tweek Tweak’s table. Specifically, from Tweek Tweak.  
     He had two fingers in his mouth and the noise Craig had heard was him gagging on them before he rapidly withdrew them. If any of the other patients hadn’t noticed the confrontation earlier they definitely were aware of it now. Some of them stood up in their seats, watching the young man in their midst convulse.  
     “Is he choking?” somebody asked, and Craig himself wasn’t even sure, but if he was, he was _so fucked_ because there still wasn’t a staff member in sight and although he had been trained to handle choking scenarios, his mind was drawing a massive blank and the most he could manage to do was stand where he was and stare like an idiot.  
     It was at that moment that Tweek got a hold of himself and seemed to remember something that he had forgotten. He made a sound much like a cartoon hillbilly would before spitting a wad of chewing tobacco in a brass jar and spat in his hand before studying his palm and doing it several more times. Craig finally found his wits and and rushed to his side, although he still wasn’t sure of what exactly he was supposed to do at all. 

     Tweek pinched something in his hand between his thumb and index finger and studied it like he wasn’t sure if what he was holding was real or a figment of his imagination. It was short, not much more than three quarters of an inch long - an object that closely resembled a thin strand of translucent plastic.  
     A fish bone. 

     Craig couldn’t help it. He full-out facepalmed, the tips of his fingers pressing heavily into his eyes before they dragged down the bridge of his nose, across his lips, and then over his chin. Seriously? Seriously. This couldn't be happening.  
     Tweek held his tray out, the fish bone placed delicately on one edge as a ghost of a pained smile made its way across his features. 

     “Can I get some meatloaf, please?” 

**Author's Note:**

> i was eating fish tonight and I got a bone stuck in my throat because I can't be bothered to chew my food like a decent human being.  
> my cat was trying to crawl all over my laptop as I was writing this and I accidentally touched her butt during one of this times that I was moving her so basically I touched a cat's anus to bring this fic to you guys and you definitely should leave at least a kudo to commemorate my sacrifice because there was something crusty stuck on it and that entire experience was awful because I also got cat hair in my mouth because she's shedding and every time you touch her fur just explodes into the atmosphere like some sort of awful, sentient, lip-seeking atomic bomb that also gets stuck to the screen of my laptop and then it sticks there because of static and when I try to brush it all it all just ends up getting stuck in the edges.  
> so yeah.


End file.
